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Historical Kick: Weighing The Hit Against Iran

CrossFireArabia
January 14, 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a reprint of an article written by me and posted in 2008 about Israel gearing up to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. Perceptive is the fact it took Israel and and the USA 17 years, in June 2025, to make a direct hit on Iran and its nuclear facilities. Today, US President Donald Trump, and with the current protests in Iran, is weighing the options for another direct on Iran. However Tehran said it will retaliate with more launches on Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities just as it did last year as well on as US military bases. The reprint is made here with the same title, Weighing the hit against Iran as it appeared in the Media Monitors Network.

Will Israel hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, or won’t they? You would think everyone would be talking about it on the international level, and it might be the case judging from the newspaper articles that are being churned out about a possible nuke followed by regional conflagration.

In Jordan news is in full throttle: Yes Israel is contemplating a hit on Iran and it is in line with its power-hungry policies to dominate the region even if it eventually destroys itself.

Newspapers here see Israel as careless and would not only be prepared for that slippery-slope of a nuclear exchange but would use her nukes as a deterrent force to stop Iran from gaining her own nuclear capability.

Iran is not afraid, saying time and again, her nuclear development is for peaceful purposes and it will have a nuclear capability come what may regardless of what Israel is trying to do and of the international nuclear inspectors monitoring her activities which is more than can be said of Israel whose nuclear reactors and capabilities remain a state secret.

On a more personal level, I briefly talked to my wife about the possible hit in Iran, which I thought was well probable after reading the recent articles, and she just looked and said the issue is being blown out by media talk: There “won’t be war” and it is “media hype”.

Someone else just made fun of the issue. All this was going on when International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammad Al Baradei was warning that if a strike does happen then it will surely turn the region into a ball-fire.

Ball-fire or not, the journalists and media were having a field day, now they say is the best time to strike because US President George W. Bush is nearing his tenure in office and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in trouble over allegation of corruption charges and accepting bribes, and so the theory states if he is going to go then he wants to go in style.

But such reports and opinions are being made when the actual devastation and the far-reaching consequences of a potential strike and the subsequent military and nuclear exchange is underplayed and even treated as a daily occurrence where people will just pick up the pieces and continue with their lives.

People, including the media are not fully aware of what a nuclear exchange would mean, in terms of the scale of human losses, of radiation, devastation, the so-called nuclear winter of darkness, the nuclear holocaust that would actually make the area, the region and the geography completely uninhabitable for many years to come.

While this maybe the case in the West with the media there long tackling these issues, especially at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, here the media has taken more of a sedate view about tackling these subjects especially since more important issues were on the scene.

That is up till now. Seeing the issue as an extension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, today the media is using the possible strike as a point of titillating us into fright regardless of the cynicism of many people like my wife who keep saying its media scare-mongering. But, and regardless again, what is required is a real cold analysis of the situation as it exists.

Would Israel be willing to take a chance and strike, whether military or nuclear, knowing full-will that the present Iran has the long-range missile capability, and knowing also the United States is not too sure and can’t make up its mind about the strike while playing lip service to negotiation and diplomatic talk.

Iran is not Iraq; this is not 1982 when Israeli F 16s flew over the region and bombed the Ozreiq reactor being built by under Saddam Hussein. Despite the fact the Americans are in Iraq, and the Israelis are flexing their muscles against the Palestinians and frequently threatening the Lebanese and Syrians, the security and military environment in the region is changing,

New powers like Iran, Syria, Turkey and non-state actors like Hizbollah and maybe Hamas are increasingly making headways in the region and internationally, and therefore a direct hit on Iran by Israel would not be received at all well by the Europeans who already recognize Israel’s intransigence on the Middle East process regardless if they want to do something about it or not.

Today, Israel’s image is increasingly at stake, an image that has come to be increasingly tarnished since the start of the Intifada in the year 2000, and Israel would definitely not want to rock the boat by seeking to pot practice with its own nuclear war heads and missiles–guessed at 200 in the late 1990s–on states like Iran.

The other important thing to remember is that Israel values its own existence and survival; that’s why it will not practice adventurist measures to the point where it may destroy itself through nuclear striking other nations even though such would be surgical strikes or limited which are nullified for all intense and purpose.

Hence survival is not only a security argument but an ideological one that involves an entity, identity and statehood. An Israeli state even if it does survive a nuclear exchange would probably be sitting in an ocean of radiation still far to be within the parameters of Europe, and certainly too far to remain as the United States valuable ally because if all things are destroyed there would be no need to have a “trusted friend” in the Middle East.

These continue to be in the realm of possibilities and conjectures. However, and against the argument of nuclear hit on Iran is the fact that American troops are in Iraq, in the middle of what would become a “nuclear ball-fire”. This is, unless of course, Israel refuses to give warning and go for the element of surprise and unleashes its weapons against Iran in the hope of preemption, a doctrine the US used for launching its 2003 war to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy his so-called weapons of mass destruction which were subsequently proved false.

Opinion

No Solace in Cheney’s Death

CrossFireArabia
November 8, 2025

By Ismail Al Sharif

I did what I thought was my duty – Dick Cheney.

Because of him, more than five million people were killed, and more than 38 million displaced from their homes in what was falsely called the “War on Terror.” And now, the man, mainly responsible for those crimes has passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, after his heart stopped beating: And I thought he had no heart. If there were any justice in this world, he should have died alone in a cold, empty cell.

Dick Cheney, Vice-President to George W. Bush, who effectively wore the mantle of the President, the true ruler behind the scenes, has passed away. Cheney is considered the chief architect of the expansion of American militarism and one of the most bloodthirsty criminals in modern history. He cast his heavy shadow on one of humanity’s darkest periods, leaving behind an indelible stain of shame on the face of humankind.

Cheney was one of the key architects of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which laid the foundation for the idea that the United States should be the sole dominant power in the world, leading a unipolar system through which it would dictate its will to other nations using economic pressure and military force. This approach persists to this day, as America has never ceased waging wars and instigating conflicts since then.

The events of 11 September, 2001, presented him with a golden opportunity to implement his agenda. His influence within the Bush administration soared to unprecedented levels, and he was the one who coined the term “dark side,” which granted intelligence agencies broad powers to spy on citizens and use torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He was the first to promote the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion, claiming that the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein was essential for American national security, while his true aim was to seize Iraqi oil. Meanwhile, his company, Halliburton, was reaping enormous profits from the war and securing lucrative contracts, leaving him with a fortune estimated at $150 million.

When one of his top aides, Joseph Wilson, publicly questioned his account of Iraq, Cheney retaliated with a covert act of revenge: Leaking the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, effectively ending her career. Lewis Libby was later convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury before receiving a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.

Cheney was also the architect of Paul Bremer’s appointment as President Bush’s special envoy to Iraq after the invasion. Bremer meticulously implemented the neoconservative agenda, privatizing state-owned enterprises and reversing the 1972 nationalization of oil, granting international oil companies sweeping concessions for exploration and investment. Cheney was rewarded by having control of the oil. A 2003 CNN report concluded the war in Iraq was about oil, and that the real winners were the major oil companies.

History later proved that all of Cheney’s justifications for the war were false. No weapons of mass destruction were found, while millions of children and women perished, and thousands of American soldiers were killed defending the interests of the elite and Zionists in a senseless and unjustified war. Thus, Cheney became one of the most controversial figures in modern American history.

Cheney died, but his legacy did not. The ideology of hegemony and militarism that he instilled still governs power politics today. His body is gone, but he left behind a generation of monsters who continue to implement his agendas of murder, tyranny, and greed. Perhaps the recent war on Gaza is the truest testament to the fact that his ideology was not buried with him.

There is no solace in Cheney’s death, for his crimes are too horrific to be contained by fire, just as is the case with Netanyahu and all those who follow in his footsteps.

This article by Ismail Al Sharif was originally written in Arabic for the Addustour daily.

Opinion

In a Psychedelic Arab World

Dr Khairi Janbek
March 19, 2025

Dr Khairi Janbek

The Arab world has been for some time now like a theme park with all the trappings. There are zones of fun and entertainment, with bright lights, cafes and restaurants with people living in them whilst other zones stand like halls of mirrors with distort images, chambers of horror, and ghost trains with their own population.

The ones who run both zones tend to be standing outside them frequently greeting each other. But the people of the entertainment zone are always wary that the people of the other zone may envy them, so they give them enough to let them carry on with their lives as best as they can.

The obsession with the geographical and civilizational unity of the Arab world has always inflated expectations of Arab solidarity as a tool to solve the problems of Arab societies ranging from economic development and good governance, to conflict resolution.

As the expectations go unmet, popular frustration at the weakness of one nation, prompt further calls for solidarity accompanied with anger from the other Arab people, however, it seems, and for all intents and purposes, the pan-Arab hopes seem to be always unreasonable. In fact when the colonialists thought that the Arab peoples should be grateful to each have their own nation-states across the geographical span, the Arab peoples, as a whole, felt cheated for not having a single, one-state to represent them.

As for the current Palestinian tragedy, its roots in recent terms have been planted in 1974, when the late King Hussein was put under extreme pressure to accept the notion that, the PLO, being the sole representative of the Palestinian people, in other words transferring the Arab burden of the Palestinian problem to the shoulders of the late Yasser Arafat.

Of course, one is not going to repeat the horrors which came after that regarding this issue, but the idea that the Palestinian issue being an Arab cause, ended there and then. The Palestinian issue went from being a political issue, to a mere human rights concern, with the option for the Arab states to support according to the levels of anger expressed by their own populace regarding the Palestinian people’s plight.

It was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that struck the final nail in the coffin of the illusion that there can be an Arab solution to Arab problems, but even this illusion did not apply to the Palestinian problem, because that concern was gone almost two decades earlier.

So today, it is natural for sympathy for the Palestinians to direct its call to the international community to react, because frankly this is the only quarter which can do something, whatever it may be, because the realization had set in from before that the Arabs will not do anything.

We live in times now, in which no Middle Eastern regime, in addition to those having a state within a state inside them, will be ever permitted to ever threaten Israel by the Trump administration, be that through the threats of dividing countries, or in throwing them to the jaws of poverty and destruction through economic extortion; in fact, we are in the era of enforced ugly peace.

Dr Janbek is a columnist based in Paris France.